Between 1942 and 1963 Dorothy Canning Miller was the curator of the highly perceptive and ultimately influential Americans shows at the Museum of Modern Art. Beginning with Americans 1942: 18 Artists From 9 States and ending with Americans 1963, Miller presented the work of artists such as Hyman Bloom, Robert Motherwell, Jay DeFeo, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Lee Bontecou, and Frank Stella—artists who would ultimately be the defining contributors to the mid-century American art his... [more]

Among the 103 participants in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the handful that have elicited the most speculation and skepticism are those known for producing not art objects but texts. In addition to publishing-oriented collectives, words take on a visual function in the poetry of Susan Howe, they form the structure of many of David Diao’s paintings and Gary Indiana’s sculptures. Artspace warned us to “Get ready to do some reading.” Carol Vogel, in her New York Times pre... [more]

ArtSlant editors Natalie Hegert, Joel Kuennen, and Charlie Schultz met up at Agra, an Indian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, to discuss the opening of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, its surprises, best in show, and disappointments. They touch on trends and themes of scale, archives, lists, dongs, and objectness—parsing the line between artwork and artifact.
Charlie Schultz: I guess I’ll start by saying I found this year’s iteration of the [Whitney] Biennial to be far less crowded than in... [more]

The Cat Show was inevitable: an art exhibition devoted to the feline as internet meme, domestic partner, and kitsch icon. Contemporary cat tropes were as bound to spill into art spaces as the boom of advertising was irresistible fodder for the “pictures generation” forty years ago.
The temptation is to dismiss The Cat Show, now on view at White Columns, as pandering: like a motorcycle exhibition or Harry Potter at the Discovery Center. The Walker Art Center presented a wildly popular Int... [more]

Intersecting at familiar angles that recall the pages of a book left open, the walls of the upstairs gallery of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts act as meticulous displays for the intermedia exhibition Painting Between the Lines. Reading these spaces the way we would read a book—from top to bottom, left to right—viewers encounter, first, the names of authors and the foundational texts that they penned, including Marcel Proust and Swann’s Way, Milan Kundera and The Unbearable Lightness of B... [more]